INDIAN OCEAN IN THIRTEENTH CENTURY 29 



gators. They invented, if not the compass, at all events 

 something that resembled the compass, so early as A.D. 

 121, and Mr. Beazley gives us a picture of the little mag- 

 netized man who stood on the prow of the Chinese ship 

 in the eighth and ninth centuries, indicating the South 

 by outstretched hand. 1 Under such guidance their 

 great junks, capable of holding six hundred or seven 

 hundred men, sailed the seas from Canton to the Persian 

 Gulf. 2 For, till the Revolution of 878, the Chinese were 

 a commercial nation, welcoming the merchants of India, 

 of Persia, and of Arabia, and themselves making trading 

 voyages to these distant lands. In China, as in India, 

 religion as well as commerce had made men travellers.. 

 Chinese Buddhists travelled to India both overland and 

 by sea. Sometimes they visited Java on the way ; for 

 Java, we remember, was at the time one of the great centres 

 of Buddhist worship. There is even a story that Chinese 

 Buddhists visited and colonized a distant land in the 

 East, which some historians have identified with America. 

 After 878, it is true, a new policy reigned in China. The 

 foreign merchants were massacred or expelled. Chinese 

 voyages henceforth seldom extended beyond Ceylon. 

 And yet, later improvements in the compass seem to show 

 that Chinese navigators still continued energetic, scien- 

 tific, progressive. The earliest use of the water-compass, 

 we are told, is fixed at mi to 1117,- nearly a century 

 earlier than its first mention in Europe (n8o-H9o). 3 

 In the thirteenth century the Mongol conquest once 

 more made China a commercial nation, with doors wide 

 open to foreign trade, and with merchant ships eager 

 for new markets, however distant. But on the subject 

 of Chinese navigation in the days of the Great Kaan 

 our authority is Marco Polo, and we now turn from our 

 survey of the Indian Ocean in the thirteenth century 

 to follow the story of European travel. 



Let us, for the present, note with emphasis the fact that The 

 our story centres in Java. If Asia had any knowledge of 



1 Beazley, vol. i. p. 489. 2 Beazley, vol. i. p. 485. 



3 Beazley, vol. i. -p. 490 note. 



